Abstract
Incumbents typically seek a highly committed and at the same time highly competent child as a successor, yet such a candidate is often not available. Extant literature is unable to predict which desired attribute—commitment (i.e., willingness) or competence (i.e., ability)—is most important in this dilemma. Drawing from institutional logics literature, we suggest that the incumbent’s personal experiences, education, and cultural embeddedness, as much as firm-level situational stimuli, direct incumbent attention to either corporate logic, favoring competence, or family logic, favoring commitment, to guide decision-making about which family member to choose as a successor. We test our hypotheses using policy capturing with responses of 1,060 family firm owner-managers, and contribute to research on succession, family firms, and institutional logics.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 330-353 |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Journal | Family Business Review |
| Volume | 32 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 12 Mar 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We gratefully acknowledge helpful comments from Kimberly Eddleston, Marc Gruber, Jeremy Miles, Petra Moog, Sabine Rau, Karl Wennberg, and participants of the Stockholm School of Economics research seminar, the Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2014, the 2014 German conference on family firms, and the Rencontres de St.-Gall 2014. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Data collection for this study received financial support from Credit Suisse, Switzerland.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2019.
Keywords
- decision making
- family firms
- institutional logics
- succession
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Business, Management and Accounting (miscellaneous)
- Finance